Current weather

We had a scare the other day. Staff at the Kenai Municipal Airport suspected elodea, a nasty invasive freshwater plant, was in their floatplane basin, so we scrambled to see what was there. Elodea can be spread by floatplanes, boat props, and even fishing equipment.

In June, I bicycled the Dalton Highway (aka Haul Road) from Prudhoe Bay to Fairbanks. It was everything I expected — hot, dusty, buggy and endless mountains with 12 percent grades. In other words, it was an experience, not a vacation.

This Sunday is Father’s Day, a national holiday since 1972 that celebrates the good things that fatherhood can bring to their families and society. But a recently-released AP poll found that 2 in 5 unmarried women without children would consider having a child on their own without a partner, including more than a third who would consider adopting solo. So what good is Dad?!

Despite all the snow still on the ground, April 1 was the official start of the 2013 fire season in Alaska. For many years, the season started on May 1, but it was changed in 2006 largely because of the increasing threat of “pre-green up” grassland fires in the aftermath of the spruce bark beetle outbreak on the Kenai Peninsula. The year before, in 2005, the Tracy Avenue Fire near Homer started on April 29, burning 5,400 acres in what was described by the Division of Forestry’s director as the “earliest large complex fire in the state’s history.”

I used to love watching Boston Legal on TV, in which William Shatner plays Denny Crane, the loony head of a law firm who occasionally claims to have mad cow disease. While guffaw-funny at the time, the group of diseases that mad cow disease belongs to, Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies (TSEs), is not.

While helping out at a ski meet this past weekend, several of us mostly middle-aged parents were gloating about what a great place we live in. Our healthy and hopefully well-educated kids were skiing through a well-groomed lighted trail system, adjacent to a well-maintained high school just off a segment of the Alaska highway system, within spitting distance of the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, 2 million acres set aside by Congress for wildlife and recreation.

I tried one last time in mid-December to fill my caribou harvest permit from the Kenai Mountain herd. After post-holing on snowshoes for the better part of two days, it took my buddy and I all of 15 minutes of glassing upper Cannonball Creek before deciding to abandon the hunt. The short winter days, the minus 20 degrees, the 3 feet of snow, and the almost total absence of wildlife other than a handful of ravens, chickadees, redpolls, and gray jays made us think twice about continuing on.

The legacy of World War II continues to play out in strange ways. As veterans returned home to the U.S., including many who homesteaded in Alaska in the 1940s and 50s, they helped give birth to what we now call the Baby Boomer generation. The Boomers have since grown up, had their own kids, and are now rapidly joining the ranks of retirees.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is no stranger to this demographic phenomenon. As many as 50 senior employees in Alaska are retiring next month, about 10 percent of the agency workforce in our state.

In exchange for ice cream, my 10-year old daughter, Charly, and her friend, Anya, were picking currants when a couple of sedge darners landed nearby. Once the girls figured out that the dragonflies were mating, they changed their tune from “cool” to “gross” pretty quickly. The dragonflies were locked in the “wheel position” that looks a lot like a heart (see photo). This got me to wondering why these insects were having sex so late in the summer.

I spent last week “bear viewing” at the McNeil River State Game Sanctuary on the other side of the Cook Inlet. I put quotation marks around this activity because it was so much more than just watching brown bears do their thing in the wild.